Developing Potential

Big Difference Consulting Ltd. July 2007

In This Issue

The Best £20 I ever Spent

The Payoffs of Being a Headless Chicken!

Relax - You're Never Going to Finish Your To-do List - and that's OK!

The Best £20 I ever Spent

When I'm coaching someone I often look for the key that will help them open up and deal with the real issues. With some of the more challenging coachees it can take a lot of imagination, searching and trial and error before the key is found. Sometimes I find it useful to be provocative to get a reaction especially when I'm trying to unblock someone who is really stuck. Recently I was coaching a first line supervisor - let's call him Phil - who was counting the years to retirement. It was hard for him to stop looking at life through his rear view mirror.

Phil had a lot of gripes about the way he and his fellow supervisors worked as a team. Having worked with the organisation for a number of years, Phil had no trouble outlining the problems that he felt beset it:

Not using manpower in the best, most efficient way
Very low motivation levels due to the repetitive nature of job
Low job prospects for staff
High labour turnover

Where Phil was stuck was with his inability to come forward with recommendations and actions to put the situation right. It was easier for him to stay with the complaints rather than be proactive and put forward ideas that could help. When I asked him for solutions, he shook his head and sighed, saying:

"Everything is too much trouble"
"Why should I bother?"
"No one's going to be interested"
"It's been tried before"
"Nothing will ever change"

And then he hit on the final complaint:

"Anyway, they don't pay me enough."

Phil looked down at the floor.

I asked him "How much money would you need?"

"More than they (the Company) could afford" he said without looking up.

I got out my wallet and peeled off a £5 note and put it on the table saying "Is £5 enough."

He looked bemused and shook his head.

I took the £5 note back and replaced it with a tenner. "Is that enough?"

He started to smile and I waited.

I took back the tenner and replaced it with a £20 note. "How about £20 then?"

Phil laughed out loud, leaned forward, picked up the note and pocketed it.

And the flood gates opened!

For the next 15 minutes I scribbled furiously as Phil outlined his ideas for improving the company which included:

Cross-training
Regular job rotation
More training for supervisors
Making better use of manpower

He was sure that implementing these ideas would result in:

Meeting targets on time
Increased job interest and motivation
Greater flexibility
More opportunities for promotion
Reduced labour turnover
Sense of teamwork - with everyone working together as a team

Phil enlisted my support in preparing a Powerpoint presentation which he would use to put his ideas to the management team.

£20 had been the key needed to turn Phil around to taking a completely different perspective on his life and make the shift from viewing life in his rear-view mirror to taking proactive control. Surely £20 well spent!

(By the way, later that day, Phil put his head round the door, winked and placed a filled baguette in front of me. I also discovered he'd treated the rest of the team to lunch.)

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Big Difference Consulting Ltd.

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Hinksey Hill

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OX1 5BE

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Registered in England and Wales 4668208 Registered Office: 167 Oxford Rd Cowley Oxford OX4 2ES England

Greetings,

Welcome to the third edition of Developing Potential. I hope you find something useful and interesting in it. You are receiving this as you are already one of our clients or we have already been in contact and feel it might be of interest to you.

In this issue I discuss the use of provocative coaching and how I once parted with a £20 note in a coaching session to produce a desired result.

Also, I look at the payoffs of not planning at work and rushing around like a headless chicken.

And I'll pass on some hints from a time management guru that have really made a difference for me.

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If you have any comments or would like to have a chat please get in touch on 01865 736005 or email me at mark@bigdifference.co.uk

Click here to visit our new website: www.bigdifference.co.uk

Looking forward to hearing from you.

Kind regards

Mark Arnold

Managing Director

The Payoffs of Being a Headless Chicken!

One company we work with said their managers were very weak on planning and seemed to spend a lot of time fire-fighting. We visited several of their divisions and could see exactly what they meant. People danced around animatedly, gesticulating and speaking on at least two landlines and a couple of mobiles each, while still managing to tap into a computer keyboard, scribble on a pad and shout across the room. They were busy managing - and managing for them meant moving from one crisis to the next. What struck me was how much they enjoyed this way of working - they might have been flying by the seat of their pants but boy was it a lot of fun!

Fine, but the trouble was that the company faced serious quality problems and cost overruns. The blame for a lot of these was laid at the door of these managers and was caused by a total lack of effective planning.

But how would they ever change their behaviour when they were getting such a buzz from the way they were being right now?

The first thing we had to do was to get them to explore the payoffs of carrying on like headless chickens. They said it:

made them feel important
gave them a challenge
gave them an adrenaline buzz, and
made time pass quickly

On further probing, they admitted that it meant that:

they could avoid the boring stuff, like sitting down to plan
avoid worrying about the details, and
avoid having to worry about how to develop their teams

We felt it was important for them to acknowledge that there were a lot of plusses in NOT changing and staying the way they were. However, it was vital that they also realised the costs - for them, their teams and their organisation. So we got them to count the costs of being headless chickens:

absence of future focus
stress and burn-out for themselves and their teams
missed profit targets
poor quality and production faults, and
time wasted reworking

It was only when they recognised that the costs of being a headless chicken outweighed the payoffs were they able to seriously contemplate learning new behaviours.

Click here to answer a tongue-in-cheek questionnaire to see if you are breeding headless chickens in your organisation!

Relax - You're Never Going to Finish Your To-do List - and that's OK!

How well do you manage time? I don't know about you but I've always been made to feel guilty on time management courses. I've never managed to complete my to-do list, answer all my emails or phone all the people I'm supposed to phone. And if I finish the day with no more on the list at the end of the day than there was at the beginning, I regard myself as being ahead.

At last, when I read time management guru David Allen's book I felt better about myself. So I was no different from anyone else. With the increasing complexity of life in the 21^st century, no one finishes everything they have to do. It's impossible - there's just too much to do, too many emails, too many projects, too many calls.

So I could relax and didn't need to feel guilty. David Allen says the secret is to design a system to get it all out of your head into what he calls "bins". He calls every "to do" item with more than one task a project and all projects need to be listed so they don't get lost. Single tasks get listed on appropriate ACTION lists - probably separate lists for when you are by a phone, or at a computer, or at home, or at the shops.

Emails are also given the treatment. Instead of having hundreds of items in the Inbox, which I used to be guilty of, they are actioned immediately or transferred into custom-designed folders. Items to be dealt with quickly are put into @NEXT ACTION, items that may need attention are put into @SOMEDAY/MAYBE and items that are waiting on input from others are put into @WAITING FOR. Why the "@" sign? It ensures that the folders appear at the top of your folders list.

And the appointment diary still has its place - but it's strictly for meetings or tasks or to-do's that have to happen on a certain day. If timing is not crucial they are simply listed on the ACTION lists.

The idea is that you can completely trust your system and don't have to clutter up your head with worries about what you have to do. And to be able to trust it, you need to keep your project and action lists up to date, and keep them under review.

David Allen's ideas are certainly helping me and we draw on his ideas in our management training programmes.

I am following the system described in the book Getting Things Done by David Allen. I've been doing it pretty consistently since your visit and it has helped me a lot. By keeping up with incoming emails, voice mail, etc. and making lists, I find that I stress out less and keep up with stuff better too. (BM - travel company programme participant)

Big Difference Consulting Ltd.

Tel: 01865 736005

Fax: 08708 362201

info@bigdifference.co.uk

www.bigdifference.co.uk

8 Woodside Centre Badger Lane

Hinksey Hill Oxford OX1 5BE England